This invention relates generally to social networking and, in particular, to recommending groups for a target user to join or create, and to recommending other users for the target user to add to a group.
Automatically organizing social networking system users into groups of associated users can be an inefficient process subject to mistakes. Social networking systems may have up to hundreds of millions of users or more, so selecting the most relevant groups for each user is a resource-intensive process. Large numbers of social networking system users also make the manual organization of groups by the user a time-consuming process, and may result in the user failing to identify the groups most relevant to the user. Thus, the time needed by users to manually identify relevant groups makes it likely that certain users do not join groups that they otherwise would join. Further, requiring manual group selection may discourage a user from creating a new group because of the time involved in adding users to a created group. Simplifying the identification of groups for users to join, the identification of users to add to groups and the creation of groups allows social networking system users to better identify groups of other users with similar interests, improving overall user interaction with the social networking system.